Starting with Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s assertion that part 3 = is ‘albedo’ (white) and part 4 = ‘nigredo’ (black) [as was the first section], I thought of yin-yang esp as CPE says the moat is reminiscent of the circle of chalk…so a circle again, following on from my womb circle…since I had already decided to work on the two sections as a matching pair and probably as two halves of a single image, I vaguely thought of having the two paintings in portrait format with the image split vertically, one half of the circle on one board and the the other half on the other.

Looking through my collage elementsI decided that my black would, this time, probably be a “green-black” to reflect the earth/orchard…Also found myself attracted to figure diving in water and watery scenes in general but was worried about going too far off track…Then today realised that I’m not that moved by pears the way I have been by apples so decided that perhaps I needed a goddess image so that her breasts could represent the pears.

Later I remembered “The Love Embrace of the Universe” by Frida Khalo and rushed to look at the image and found lots of similarities to what I had been thinking of there. I had already selected a moon image (the white eye of the yin half of the circle) and it was only a matter of time before I chose a another orb to accompany it as I have already used this juxtaposition in part 2 and also in another collage El Sentido de Los Sueños…I was very attracted to Frida’s use of the big hands at the bottom of the image as I saw a link there to the many hands I used in the preceding section. In Frida’s work, the black hand is holding roots which ties in nicely with the tree roots in my previous painting as well as the orchard and wise-wild woman who lives under the earth in my previous two…

And so I began my search for a Goddess and came across this wonderful representation of the Babylonian goddes Tiamat by anthropologist and artist J.B. Waskul which, with unbelievable synchronicity, is not only set in a circle but a circle split vertically in half. I had never heard of this goddess but reading Draco, the Dragon by Lana Rings I discovered that perhaps she is related to Demeter and to the word diameter which of course is the line that splits a circle in half…She represents “the primordial oceanic waters from which all things came, the primordial womb, reminiscent of the oceanic waters of the womb…” and that “According to the various myths the waters divided themselves or were divided to allow life to spring forth”. Rings also writes that The Tiamat story is a metaphor for birth… She is the primordial waters, and from the darkness of the human mother’s womb, we are born into life and light.” Since my last section grew to be about the gestation before birth, it seems only fitting that the next part should be about birth itself…and suddenly my attraction to watery images didn’t seem so far off track. I could also see those scaley leg apendages of Tiamat’s mutating nicely into tree roots…

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